Anne Applebaum is a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Washington Post.
She began working as a journalist in 1988, when she moved to Poland to become the Warsaw correspondent for the Economist. She covered the collapse of communism across Central and Eastern Europe, writing for a wide range of newspapers and magazines.
Returning to London in 1992, she wrote for a range of publications including the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Telegraph, the Evening Standard and the Spectator Magazine for which she became deputy editor.
Her first book, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, described a journey through Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus, then on the verge of independence. Her most recent book, Gulag: A History narrates the history of the Soviet concentration camps system and describes daily life in the camps. It makes extensive use of recently opened Russian archives, as well as memoirs and interviews. Gulag: A History won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-Fiction, as well as Britain’s Duff-Cooper Prize. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Award and the Samuel Johnson Prize. It has appeared or is due to appear in more than two dozen translations, including all major East and West European languages.
Over the years, her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Foreign Affairs, the Boston Globe, the Independent, the Guardian, Commentaire, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Newsweek, the New Criterion, the Weekly Standard, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, The National Review, The New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement and the Literary Review, among others. She has appeared as a guest and as a presenter on many radio and television programs, among them BBC’s Newsnight, the Today Progamme, the Week in Westminster, as well as CNN, MSNBC, CBS and Sky News.
Applebaum was born in Washington, DC in 1964. After graduating from Yale University, she was a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics and St. Antony’s College, Oxford. In 1992 she won the Charles Douglas-Home Memorial Trust award for journalism in the ex-Soviet Union. Between East and West won an Adolph Bentinck prize for European non-fiction in 1996. Her husband, Radek Sikorski, is a Polish politician and writer. They have two children, Alexander and Tadeusz.